Making the case for Parallella

I am happy to tell you that we now have a neat little case for the Parallella board thanks to the outstanding work of Alex Paloranta!

In the past the task of properly cooling the board was left up to the user. For some of you this was fine, but for many of you this was a showstopper. The goal of the new case design is to make the heating problem go away once and for all. Honestly, I am kicking myself for not making this happen earlier!

Based on initial thermal testing, it does look we have solved the problem. I used the case to showcase the FPGA accelerator project at Argonne National Laboratory a few weeks back and I can tell you that it makes a world of difference.

There are 5,000 cases on their way from China. Hopefully we can have them on the shelves in about 8 weeks.

For those of your who can’t wait and have access to a machine shop, the case sources are available HERE.

Cheers,

Andreas

4 Comments

Sorry, not quite grasping how this cools the Parallella better than the heatsink provided and a fan. I’ve looked at the diagrams and drawings on GitHub and it’s not glaringly obvious. Does this work with or without the existing heatsink provided? The case doesn’t appear to house a fan, although there’s probably enough room inside [or is that space for a Porcupine board?]. Is the mounting plate made of heat-conductive metal (intended to take the place of the heatsink), to be attached to the Parallella with heat conductive stickers as is the current heat sink? It appears (I’m guessing here!) that this provides conductive heat transfer to the larger aluminum body, rather than conductive transfer to the heat sink and then forced-air cooling of the heat sink. If a Parallella owner has already attached the heat sink with stickers, is it safe to remove it in order to use this case? [I don’t want to damage my board mechanically by pulling off the heatsink.]

[…] last year we realized that if nobody was going to design a low cost case for the Parallella we would have to do it ourselves. Unfortunately release to general availability was delayed due to the 24/7 Epiphany-V project, but […]